It was on the tarmac at Lanseria Airport one bright sunny African afternoon that I had my last cigarette. I was lying strapped to a stretcher with my neck in a brace to stop it from moving. I had been offloaded from the small twin-engine KingAir that had flown me for two hours from Lusaka to Johannesburg. The paramedic pushed me on a wheeled stretcher, clear of the plane. He lit a fag and offered one to me. I was gagging a nicotine hit, and as I sucked hard on my first smoke for over two days he said, ‘Where you’re going, mate, that’ll be your last one for a bit. Enjoy….’.
I have misty memories of arriving at Milpark Hospital. My underpants were cut off, leaving my watch as the sole item of property I had with me. I had tubes stuffed down my throat and a doctor asking me a pile of questions. For the next two weeks or so my view of the world was restricted to the ceiling in the intensive care unit. I had a circular metal frame around my head with screws drilled into the sides of my skull. This was somehow attached to a weight to keep my neck in traction whilst the spinal surgeon battled to determine the best way to deal with my fractured neck vertebrae.
The swelling inside the compressed break apparently dictated that no surgery could be done quickly. I would just have to lie flat on my back, unable to turn my head, staring straight upwards. This was my introduction to the world of immobility and paralysis.
Time was punctuated by morphine shots every few hours which came as a massive relief and an escape from reality. It transported me into another world, almost as if I was back at the lake, on a deep dive and feeling the gradual narcotic buzz of the build up nitrogen in the bloodstream.
The ward that I was lying in had previously been the children’s ward, and, directly over my head, staring down down at me from the low ceiling was a painted cartoon picture of The Jungle Book’s Mowgli. After a shot of morphine, Mowgli came to life and he seemed to dance around on the ceiling with eyes spinning around inside his sockets, laughing and mocking me, as if to say, You ain’t the king of the swingers now, and, you sure ain’t no jungle VIP.
When darkness came to the unit, Mowgli disappeared and the morphine took me to another place. I could just fumble the earbuds of a borrowed iPod into my ears and I would play music to block out some of the other night sounds in the ward. There was a young lad somewhere opposite and to the left of my bed who had been in a motorbike accident and was in constant pain; there was an elderly Afrikaans farmer who was on a ventilator and needed help just to breathe. There happened to be another spinal injury who had arrived on the same day as me – a young woman from Zambia, injured on a farm. I could see none of them and I had no idea how big the room was, but I could vaguely place where they were from the sounds they made.
There was one piece of music I played countless times at full blast that transported me away, Casta Diva from the opera Norma sung by Filippa Giordano. The music and the morphine would take me onto a small dark red carpet flying out of that space. Cruising above the escarpment surrounding my place on the lake, Lake Tanganyika, it would then zoom down to earth skimming alongside flower-filled gardens, ferns, creepers and then into meadows, forests and jungles, lakes and mountains. The carpet would bank and turn and swerve whilst all the time I sat comfortably on the middle of it like Aladdin, speeding past all these vivid colours, shapes and forms. It was beyond any wild ride in a theme park.
I would beg the nurses to give me more morphine when the images started to blur and fade, but would often be told that I would have to wait for an hour or two, which then seemed to stretch into forever. The red carpet slowly dissolved like smoke and I would be dumped back in the ward staring at the darkness and waiting for the scrawny little Mowgli with his spinning eyeballs to taunt me in the morning. I swore that when I was able to walk again I would go back and paint Mowgli out of existence. Baloo the bear was always my favourite anyway…..
Months passed. Vivid morphine escapes. My neck break grafted with bone from my hip. Two debridements to remove necrotic flesh from a fist-sized pressure sore that had developed the base of my spine. Severe bleeding. Blood transfusions. Consultations about a skin graft. The prospect of more time just lying in a hospital bed. Waiting and wondering.
Time passed and this new life has gradually evolved in mid Wales. When I look back and reflect on all the things that happened it was a sudden, dramatic, surreal and terrifying “removal”. Not only a physical removal from the place on the lake where I had built a life where I felt attached, rooted and at home. It was also a physical removal from a fit, strong and able body, to a body that is paralysed. This has all fundamentally changed many of my attitudes and perceptions of the world and the way I fit into it.
Whilst the swivel-eyed Mowgli no longer taunts me from the ceiling, the likes of Trump, Johnson, Cummins and Re-Smog are disturbing replacement over the mainstream media.
I don’t need a magic carpet to take me flying through imaginary vistas any more, sitting outside on a fine sunny day I get a sense of peace and calm from the garden, and a fine malt whisky is a more than an able substitute for the morphine…. Just can’t understand why I can’t get the whisky on prescription.
